


Three Times Steve Wore Makeup and One Time Billy Saw It

by lesbianferrissbueller



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: 5 Times, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bisexual Steve Harrington, Crushes, F/F, Gay Billy Hargrove, Good Babysitter Steve Harrington, M/M, Makeover, Makeup, Pre-Relationship, Self-Discovery, as in cosmetics, boys in makeup, but really its 4, hes glamorous and masculine, theres drag queens really briefly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:00:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22770634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianferrissbueller/pseuds/lesbianferrissbueller
Summary: 1st Time: Your then-gf gives you a makeover before a make-out sesh2nd Time: Your best friend and her crush give you another makeover before attending a drag show3rd Time: You start to do it yourself, for shits n giggles but also for the confidence boost4th Time: The girls you babysit convince you to let them give you a makeover, which you agree to because you're used to it at this point, and then your enemy-turned-friend who you have complex feelings about shows up.
Relationships: (mentioned) - Relationship, Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington, Past Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler - Relationship, Robin Buckley/Heather Holloway
Comments: 26
Kudos: 239





	Three Times Steve Wore Makeup and One Time Billy Saw It

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts), [keysmashdnp](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keysmashdnp/gifts).



> Gifting this to the two people that brought up Steve in makeup therefore making it an idea bouncing around my brain for a million years

For many years, Steve didn't really care about wearing makeup the same way he didn't really care about olives on pizza. Like, he didn’t ever specifically order olives on his pizza, but if there was only olive-bedecked pizza left in a box he never went to the trouble of picking them off. 

Steve was also aware that many of the rest of the male student body of Hawkins High probably hated the very idea of wearing makeup (probably out of fear, not gonna lie).

Some of them probably also hated olives. 

People sort of gave Steve a free pass to do non-typically masculine things after sophomore year, when he came out as bi to everyone except his parents. Like, no one was particularly chill with the idea when it first came up, but no one was opposed, and over time it just got more normal. 

Besides, Steve didn’t really date guys anyway. As everyone knows, men are trash, and like, 99.9% of girls are hot as shit while like 10% of guys are… fine. So the dating pool was larger on one end. 

One time, after they started dating, when Steve and Nancy were supposed to be doing homework, she did his makeup instead. It was the first time Steve had ever worn makeup, never previously having a drive nor an aversion to trying it. 

Nancy had been staring at him with this little smile and he went, “I thought we were supposed to be studying” in as obvious as a ‘wanna-make-out’ tone as he could when she said. “We are! We are. I just keep getting distracted by your,” she gestured, “Big, pretty, boy eyes.”

“‘Boy eyes’?” Steve laughed. 

“Yeah! Like, boys always have  _ amazing _ eyelashes and they never do anything with them! It’s totally unfair. I would spend ages getting mine to look like yours.”

“I don’t think you need to-”

“I would like it, is all I mean.” She smiled at him. 

“Totally unfair, huh?” Steve quoted her.

“Completely.”

“You could do something with mine if you want.”

“Really?” Nancy lit up. Doing things that made Nancy happy always made Steve ecstatic. 

“Sure. Doll me up or whatever.”

Nancy literally clapped her hands with excitement before hauling all her various boxes and pallets and pens and pencils over from her vanity and swatching colors on Steve’s wrist and asking his opinion. But he just kept saying he trusted her opinion and she could do whatever she wanted. She ‘just did some minor touches here and there’, but Steve really liked it. Liked how clean and sharp his features looked, liked the starkness of his eyes. Nancy posted a pic of her handy-work on her snap story when she was done. People loved it. She kept telling Steve he had amazing bone structure the whole time. And they made out for a while after, which meant two different colors of lipstick stains. Nancy admitted after that she understood why Steve liked having her lipstick stains on his shirt collars. And Steve had to take it all off when he went home later but kept thinking about it anyway. People didn't even really tease him about it at school, even if he wrote it off like the whole thing was Nancy's idea and not his. But that wasn't really lying, it was both their ideas. 

He told her she could do it again sometimes if she wanted. 

Ages after Nancy and Steve broke up, Robin found out Steve had worn makeup before and just said ‘of course.’

“What do you mean, ‘of course’?” Steve was sort of defensive.

“Just that you're insanely vain.” She grinned at him. “And I can totally see you going all glam with your whole, you know, face thing.”

“Glam?”

“Yeah, like, you know.” She made some vague hand gestures

“I don’t know.”

Robin gasped and forced Steve to watch a bunch of Instagram makeup tutorials she had saved to her phone of ‘glam’ looks.

“The eyeliner thing is super cool, how do they get it that smooth?” He asked, both of them still mesmerized by the smooth application of product after product. 

“Practice. Took me years to even get my wing placement right in my head.”

“Wait, so you know how to do this?”    
“Sure. Well,” Robin made a face, “Heather is a lot better at it than me.”

“Oh! Is this the kind of makeup she does?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Is that why you have all of these saved on your phone. Are you trying to get better to impress her or something-”

“Fuck off.” Robin pushed him, smiling. 

Lucky for all of them, Robin had gotten herself, Steve and Heather tickets to an all-ages drag show the next weekend. Robin told Steve if he ever wanted to try wearing full face glam, that would be a great time. 

Heather did it for him, told him some of her favorite techniques while Robin was visibly enamored with the idea of Heather being good at anything. Steve didn't do a full face, but he did have something Heather told him was called a ‘halo eye’, which he liked. It was fun to have makeup on  _ and  _ be sporting a dark blue suit jacket. And he got a compliment from one of the opening act queens, which made him all light-headed and Robin made fun of him for developing a crush on every drag queen he ever came in contact with to which Steve said, “There’s no shame in having a thing for powerful women.”

The idea of makeup as more than a foreign concept started to grow on Steve. More makeup videos started appearing on his insta explore page. He walked through Ulta Beauty a few times with Robin just for fun, even invested in some products. He actually practiced makeup a couple times after that- he had a natural talent for it. Nothing major, just eyeliner, brow pencil, maybe gloss. He did it at parties, and sometimes no one even noticed. It just sort of made him feel more confident. And being able to recognize a girl’s Glossier  _ Cloud Paint _ scored him major points in the flirting category. And much as Steve was always sort of worried that someone would give him shit for it, people never really did. He was still tall, still athletic, still boyish enough to be left alone for the most part. 

So Steve was pretty pressed when Billy showed up one night without warning while he was halfway-glammed. 

Steve had been hired to babysit El (as one of the few people Hopper trusted to leave her alone with) and Max (one of the few other people) at Hopper’s cabin for an evening while Hop himself went off to have a well-deserved break/date night with Joyce. Steve liked watching just the girls when he was tired (like now) because he didn't really have to  _ do _ anything. Watching the boys, or watching the party as a whole, there was always about twenty minutes of trying to talk them down from doing some dumb shit thing, and then one to four hours following that of desperately trying to supervise them while they did the aforementioned dumb shit thing. 

The girls just sort of sat and talked about comic books or music. And Steve got paid twenty bucks an hour to boot- a pretty sweet deal. 

But this particular night, Max was trying to get the basics of makeup down for El. She’d brought her actual makeup bag from home, and was just explaining some random thing when Steve cut in to give his opinion of a brand and Max gave him this dangerously excited look. 

“How do you know makeup stuff?” 

Steve looked from Max to his phone to Max again. “I, uh, think it’s cool. To do, you know. Sometimes.”

“See! I fucking told you Steve was the coolest person alive.” Max told El in a sudden outburst before picking up her makeup bag and dragging El over to where Steve was on the couch. Steve glowed with the notion that he knew enough about something to be an authority. Max struck up an entire conversation about literal cosmetics with Steve that ended in him agreeing to let both girls practice on him as a guinea pig. ‘As long as I don't have to get off the couch’ were Steve’s terms. 

They did a pretty good job too. 

Someone knocked partway through Max explaining drag contour with a video on Steve's phone, (she’d forgotten her’s at home). Steve got up off the couch to answer it, assuming it was Hopper being paranoid and double-checking on them, which he did a lot, but it wasn't. 

It was Billy. 

This was probably an extremely inopportune time for Billy to arrive and for Steve to have answered the door because Steve and Billy had only recently become something stable enough to call friends, the truce based mostly on the grounds that Billy had been a lot kinder to Max lately and Steve was one of Max’s most trusted ‘big kids’. That, and Steve and Billy both knew the other one Wasn't Straight™. 

Steve was still immediately wary, because he probably looked a little too feminine for anyone who disliked him not to make fun of, and he was sure Billy still disliked him at least a little. Why else would Billy stare at him in class or avoid him randomly when they were supposed to be on good terms. 

It also didn't help because Steve really, really, really wanted Billy to think he was cool. This wasn't really a desire Steve fully understood, and hoped wasn't a crush, because that would be very inconvenient, but a desire nonetheless. 

And there was probably a snowballs chance in hell Billy would let this go unnoticed, so Steve was braced for it. 

But no insult ever came. 

“Oh. Hey.” Was all Steve could come up with to say. 

Billy blinked more times than he usually did. “Hey.”

There was a short but cripplingly awkward silence where Steve was sure the ‘moonshadow chrome’ highlight Max had used was being overpowered by his reddening cheeks, one of those pissed off/horribly embarrassed blushes, but Billy spoke again. Like it was harder for him to talk almost. 

“I, uh,” Billy never fumbled with his words, this was weird. “Max forget her phone in my car. Thought I’d drop it off.”

“Oh, right.” Steve smiled a little, relieved. He turned over his shoulder to call Max but she responded with a ‘give us a minute!’ from the bathroom. 

“Sorry, you had to drive all the way back out.” Steve said, really just trying to relieve tension. 

“I don’t care,” Billy said, almost too quickly- what was up with this interaction? “I uh, I didn’t know you wore makeup-”

“Look,” Steve wanted to nip this in the bud. “I know it’s like,  _ extra gay _ or whatever for me to wear this shit but I’m getting paid twenty bucks an hour to keep the girls out of trouble and you know your sister gets what colors work for me which I appreciate and it’s just  _ fun _ . I mean, you always have your nails painted so I don’t see why-”

“I wasn’t gonna give you shit.” Billy cut him off. 

Steve relaxed a little. “Oh.”

Weird. 

“I was, uh,” Billy looked down at his boots, nodded, looked back up. “I was just gonna say, you look really cool. Like that.” He lifted a hand, let it drop.

Steve’s expression shifted. His stomach felt sort of light- maybe just light _ er _ . “Thanks.”

“Yeah.”

Max and El reappeared. Max snatching her phone from Billy’s hand and then grabbing Steve to drag back inside, so Steve could only manage a ‘later, man’ to Billy’s ‘see you later, Harrington.”

Steve was in a really good mood for the rest of the evening. He even agreed to participate in ‘sleepover bonding’ which apparently involved just talking about who you had a crush on, which was easy for both girls, but they rounded it on Steve with a ‘we told you who we like, now you have to tell us, it’s the rules.”

When he said ‘dunno. I don’t think I really have a crush on anyone right now,’ he sort of felt like he was lying. 


End file.
